The 15th to call the Samu, it is marked on the ambulances. (drawing) – PHILIPPE LOPEZ / AFP
- It was very difficult if not impossible to reach the 15th, 17th or 18th Wednesday evening in a large part of France, due to an outage at the operator Orange.
- Three people are said to have died, in Morbihan and Reunion, because of these dysfunctions, said Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin.
- The general manager of Orange was summoned this Thursday morning to Place Beauvau to shed light on this failure with dramatic consequences.
Did you not succeed or did you have trouble contacting on the 15th, 17th or 18th Wednesday evening? Unfortunately, you were the victim of the giant blackout at Orange which blocked emergency numbers for Samu, firefighters and the police in part of the country. 20 minutes takes stock of the situation.
What happened ?
It all started on Wednesday evening around 6 p.m. “All the Samus have started alerting the call centers of problems. People did not manage to access the service, calls did not arrive, others cut themselves off in the middle of a conversation, ”François Braun, president of the Samu-Urgences de France union and emergency doctor, told AFP. that there is traditionally “a peak of calls in the evening around 7 pm”. The incident affected in a “partial but significant way the reception of emergency calls 15/17/18/112 on the whole of the national territory”, had indicated Wednesday evening the Ministry of the Interior.
Bouygues Telecom and Altice, the parent company of SFR, also reported disruptions. “Yes it upset the organization (…) There was no panic, we adapted very quickly, we also said to ourselves that it was not going to last too long and it was fixed for at night ”, for his part declared on Radio Classique Professor Philippe Juvin, head of the emergency department of the Georges-Pompidou hospital in Paris and LR mayor of Garenne-Colombes (Hauts-de-Seine). Replacement numbers were quickly put in place, as expected in such cases, but these are 10-digit numbers and different in each department.
What is the situation this Thursday morning?
Orange indicated that the network has been restored since midnight, on the night of Wednesday to Thursday. This is the case in most of the departments concerned since Wednesday evening by the outage. But the crisis is not completely over, however. Local radio stations France Blue tried this morning to reach the various emergency numbers, not always successfully. In the Bouches-du-Rhône, for example, the department of France’s second largest city, Marseille, the 15th was still unavailable. Disturbances were also to be noted in the Var, Alsace and Morbihan, in particular.
In the event of a problem, François Braun asked this Thursday morning on France Inter to insist by trying to call several times. Or rely on the provisional replacement numbers, still in place. Orange says it remains “vigilant” and recognizes that disruptions can persist in a “marginal” and “random” manner.
What is the human toll?
A person with “cardiovascular disease” “would have died” in Morbihan, for lack of “being able to reach the emergency services in time” because of the blackout, Interior Minister Gerald Darmanin said on Thursday morning. “Two other cardiovascular accidents [mortels] took place in Reunion, “added the minister,” but I cannot say if the time (before the arrival of help, editor’s note) was particularly long and if it is attributable to this emergency number ” . “What is certain is that people testified that they tried to call several times and that they did not succeed immediately in having operators,” he insisted.
It is obviously too early to know precisely what were the consequences of this failure of emergency numbers. We fear the worst while François Braun explained on France Inter this Thursday morning that about 50% of calls required “a rapid engagement of a means, whether it is an ambulance to transport or our resuscitation teams”. However, the Samu receives a call every second on average.
What is the origin of this failure?
The government quickly stepped up to hold Orange to account. The director general of the operator, Stéphane Richard, was summoned at the first hour this Thursday at the Ministry of the Interior and presented “his strongest apologies”. Gérald Darmanin described the service failure as “serious and unacceptable”. Prime Minister Jean Castex for his part declared that it would be necessary to “draw all the consequences”. “I immediately requested that an inspection be carried out to find out the origin of this failure. For the moment, the track of computer hacking is excluded.
Orange explained that the failure was the result of “a technical incident on router-type equipment which carries traffic”. Guest of TF1 8pm on Wednesday, the Minister of Health Olivier Véran indicated that the failure was “obviously due to a maintenance problem”. This operation “organized by Orange would have caused quite random breakdowns”, according to the minister. The operator’s responsibility could therefore be called into question, because “Orange has an obligation of result and not of means”, explained on BFMTV the spokesperson for the Ministry of the Interior, Camille Chaize.